The code I've written in personal projects have been pretty messy -- whereas code I've written professionally tend to be better (not perfect), but of course I can't share that code.

On the employer side, I would prefer the take home assignment over existing code, unless the existing code was super high quality or highly relevant to the company.

Work samples are a trap. Real problems are always way more hairy than contrived ones, which is not appreciated by people who were just introduced to the problem 30s ago. Since you wrote it while trying to actually accomplish something rather than polish up a perfect little nugget to impress someone, you probably spent way less time per line.

I only had one code sample.

As others have pointed out, there are a lot of problems:

- Many engineers don't write code outside of work and so don't have much code they can show off without breaching their employer's trust

- Those that do often don't have recent code.

- Those that have recent, personal code to show off have often written it to accomplish some goal and the code isn't necessarily a great example they feel like showing off

Really, the only people I've seen have good code samples are those who do extensive open-source work. And for those people, I'm probably already aware of that work when I checked their resume + opened their github.

99.9% of the code I’ve written is proprietary.